How to Plan Vacation Days Around Public Holidays

To get the most days off with few vacation days, open the vacation optimizer, pick your country, and type how many PTO days you have. Then type 2027 in "Year". The list shows periods where a few PTO days join public holidays and weekends into a longer break. The best ones come first. Everything is worked out in your browser.

A public holiday on a Monday or a Friday already gives you a long weekend. Add four PTO days next to it, and you get nine days off in a row. The optimizer does this for every public holiday of the year.

How to find your best periods

1. Pick your country in "Country". You can type part of the name to find it.
2. Type your number of PTO days in "Paid Time Off Days". It starts at 30.
3. Type the year in "Year". It starts at the current year and goes up to five years ahead.
4. Keep "Hide past vacation periods" ticked. It hides periods that ended before today.
5. Click a row in the list to see that period on the calendar.

The list updates as soon as you change a field. There is no button to press.

How to read the list

Each row shows "From", "To", "Total days" and "PTO days". The first rows give the most days off for each PTO day. Click a column header to sort by it.

Every period starts on a Saturday and ends on a Sunday, so the weekends at both ends are part of it. The shortest periods are nine days long. For a long weekend, such as one PTO day after a Thursday holiday, check the calendar yourself.

Below the list, four boxes show "Total days", "PTO days", "Weekend days" and "Public Holidays" for the selected row. The calendar uses the colors of the boxes: blue for PTO days, green for weekend days and purple for public holidays. Hover over a purple day to see the name of the holiday.

Each row is one option. A row never needs more PTO days than you typed, but the list does not add rows together. Pick rows whose PTO days add up to your total. To keep the list, click the "Export CSV" icon under it. It saves all rows as table-export.csv.

What the 2027 list looks like for the United States

With 15 PTO days, the list for the United States in 2027 has 51 rows. These are four of them:

Holiday	Period	Total days	PTO days
Memorial Day	May 29 to June 6, 2027	9	4
Independence Day	July 3 to July 11, 2027	9	4
Thanksgiving	November 20 to November 28, 2027	9	4
Christmas and New Year	December 18, 2027 to January 2, 2028	16	8

The Christmas row has two public holidays in it, on Friday, December 24 and Friday, December 31. The first row for 2027 starts in the year before, from December 26, 2026 to January 3, 2027.

Which holidays count

• Only public holidays count. The day after Thanksgiving is a workday in the list, so the Thanksgiving row uses it as a PTO day.
• The holidays are the ones for the whole country. Holidays of a single state or region are not in the list.
• A holiday on a Saturday or Sunday is left out, because it saves no PTO day. In Germany, December 25 and 26, 2027 fall on a weekend, so the German list for 2027 has no period in December 2027.
• Substitute days count like other holidays. In the United States, Christmas Day 2027 is a Saturday, so the list uses Friday, December 24. New Year's Day 2028 moves to Friday, December 31.
• For some countries the list stays empty, and the warning "No optimal vacation periods found. Try adjusting your settings." appears.

If your employer gives you the day after Thanksgiving off, that row needs one PTO day less.

Pick the rows that fit your PTO days, and ask for those days off early.